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All Manner of Men, 1982

In 1982 the publishers Charles Thomas of Springfield, Illinois, brought out All Manner of Men.

All Manner of Men looks at the differences between the human races. It asks how deeply rooted in our evolutionary history are the variations in our physical appearance and in our genetic constitution, and how far racial differences in anatomy and body chemistry extend to distinctive attitudes of mind and to the emotions.

This approach was not as divisive as it sounds. To understand racial differences, wrote John, is not to accentuate social discord but to appreciate the variability that enables humanity to retain its superiority in the natural world and the diversity of cultural traditions that enrich human experience. The current fashion for minimizing differences, he argued, leads to specious half-truths that merely feed prejudice and encourage bigotry. He suggested a poly-genetic alternative to the popular assumption: that homo erectus became homo sapiens not in one regional population but in parallel developments in various areas of the world. That would imply that racial differences are older than our species.

In this book, John was dabbling in social anthropology. Though original, this call was so extremely non-politically correct that it was no great surprise when the book ended up a couple of years later in pulp.

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